May 30, 1919
Poet Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, having received received the news of the Amrister Massacre, renounce his knighthood as “a symbolic act of protest.” In the repudiation letter addressed to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, he wrote “I … wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings”
